On April 5th and 6th, 2004 an international academic conference on 'The Acceleration of Criminal Proceedings' was held in Kraków. The participants were scholars and practitioners from Austria, Germany, Japan, Poland, Russia and Switzerland. The particular sessions into which the conference had been divided dealt with: the influence of constitutional and internationals legal acts on the rapidity of criminal proceedings, institutions which serve the expedition of the proceedings in the countries present at the conference, the actual duration of criminal proceedings m Poland and Germany, specific procedure as the way to accelerate the proceedings as well as the technical and organizational means to achieve this goal. During the debates the differences tn the ways of regulating the institutions affecting the rapidity of the proceedings in particular legal systems and their functioning in practice were discussed. Polish participants drew particular attention to the causes of the excessive lengthiness of the proceedings in the practice of the justice system in Poland and pointed to the means which might prevent it.